As regular readers know, I’ve long held both that American education is overdue for a rethink AND that most “reform” is oversold. Finding the sweet spot, as Michael Horn, Julie Squire, and I note in our new book, School Rethink 2.0, requires focusing on rubber-meets-road change. Rethink 2.0 offers accounts from leaders doing that work, and I’m delighted to speak with two of them today. Larry Berger is the CEO of Amplify, which he co-founded in 2000. Alexandra Walsh is the chief product officer at Amplify and a one-time high school biology teacher. Amplify is a curriculum company that serves 15 million students across the nation. Here’s what they had to say.
—Rick

Dear Rick,

We’re writing to you as we are in the midst of the busiest time of year in the curriculum business—the back-to-school season. While students are on summer break, district leaders, school administrators, and teachers are preparing for the coming school year. This means poring over schedules, budgets, and instructional plans. For core curriculum providers like Amplify, back-to-school means getting books and materials from our warehouse to classrooms. It means loading the new class rosters into our systems so that teachers and kids are properly represented and delivering the professional learning services that ensure every teacher and leader feels ready for the year to come.

This time of year also forces us to reflect on the years of work that go into designing our curriculum. We hope that our products will make measurable, positive impacts on student learning—but we acknowledge this is not a foregone conclusion. Gearing up for back-to-school is a bit like an athlete showing up to competition—the countless hours of building skills and training are important, but if you aren’t ready for showtime, it won’t matter. As we discuss below, there are elements to “being ready” that currently work well for us in our products, and elements that we hope to change.

Our chapter in School Rethink 2.0 goes into detail about the challenges of innovation in core curriculum (what used to be the textbook). Some of our discussion focuses on the specific challenges around curriculum adoption. As a refresher for readers who may be unfamiliar with the curriculum-adoption process, states and districts have a range of decisionmaking protocols for determining which curriculum providers are “endorsed,” meaning the providers can sell their curriculum in that region. One part of our chapter discusses both the challenges teacher committees can present to the curriculum-adoption process and the real appreciation we have for these bodies. While most purchasing decisions in education are made in a district’s central office or by a school leader, curriculum is the one thing that is purchased by a representative committee of teachers. It’s a detailed democratic process that makes our products and implementations stronger.

Teachers on these committees often invest considerable effort in understanding and testing the materials. They help ensure that curriculum choices are based on thorough evaluation rather than flashy features or superficial claims. Their decisions tend to garner broader acceptance among other teachers when compared with curriculum-selection decisions imposed from the top down by central-office administrators. This, in turn, leads to better implementation and buy-in, especially when the members of the teacher committees pilot the program.

We also value how teacher committees serve as a forum for raising critical feedback on areas of improvement for the product itself. We conduct substantial user research during product development, but there is nothing that replaces the value of feedback from educators actually using the product. Over the past year, we have been piloting our new math curriculum, Amplify Desmos Math, and our pilot teachers have shared insights about digital features, grading and reporting capabilities, and instructor supports that were not uncovered through earlier teacher interviews and field tests.

At the heart of our math curriculum is a belief that all students are capable of doing mathematics. The lessons are built to invite student ideas through the use of digital interactions and rich classroom discussions. Teams worked hard for years building easy-to-use yet sophisticated orchestration tools that help teachers see into live student work as it happens.

Teachers love these features when they see them in the presentations. However, it was only through piloting and real classroom use that we were able to see how challenging it was for teachers to analyze student ideas live. Teachers shared that finding the time to read the work, identify trends, and facilitate a discussion based on those trends simply wasn’t possible when you have 30 5th graders in front of you. As a such, Amplify is now working on features that leverage AI by giving teachers live prompts to help drive classroom discussions without needing to stop, read each student’s work, and decide what to do with it. We believe this has the power to transform teacher-facilitated discussion and collaboration in the classroom.

We aren’t the only ones who recognize the value of teacher committees. Their existence suggests that districts and states understand the value of teachers in making decisions about the teaching materials they will use regularly in their classrooms. Paradoxically, however, jurisdictions have set up processes that make it difficult for a publisher to integrate teacher feedback, no matter whether it is shared during a pilot or post-adoption. This makes it very difficult for publishers to improve their programs while remaining compliant.

If we are to meet teacher needs in a state adoption, where we are legally prohibited from updating the content of a program, we are often forced to find inconvenient workarounds or offer bulky add-ons to our curriculum. A static curriculum is one that risks becoming quickly outdated, whether in pedagogical approach or in actual enhancements that could improve teacher practice and student learning. In a world where software providers are constantly pushing updates to users, it is a shame that education is left behind. This feels even more pressing as the pace of AI innovation will push users to demand things we cannot even imagine at this point.

As we gear up for another school year, we desperately wish that we could push an exciting set of content updates to all of our users based on their recent feedback about making lessons work better for their classrooms. Unfortunately, in too many markets, our existing content must remain static to comply with the rules and regulations of their adoption process. As we appreciate what currently works in the curriculum-adoption and -innovation space—like teacher committees—we also seek structural changes that can help us and other providers continuously improve to meet the needs of teachers and students. Educators are telling us what they want, we are listening, and we are hoping that regulatory infrastructure changes so that we can help.